Chris Lombardi puts defense and security under the spotlight, as he shares his takes on recent NATO and EU cooperation and provides insight into the company’s own long-term strategic partnerships in Europe.

Three trends are currently driving the global electricity sector: decarbonization, decentralization and differentiation. Utilities are making significant contributions to mitigate carbon emissions, while a technology revolution is …

LETTERS

I call on the European Union heads of state in Göteborg to undertake every possible measure to keep the Kyoto protocol alive.

They must ensure that President Bush is absolutely clear that nothing short of ratifying the Kyoto protocol is acceptable and that the EU will go ahead and ratify the only international treaty on climate change with or without the USA.

President Bush claims that the Kyoto protocol is fatally flawed. What is fundamentally flawed is the lack of vision of his policies. President Bush’s commitment to US big industry, especially the oil, gas, nuclear and coal industry, seems to be more important than the health if not the very survival of the human species.

During his tenure as governor of Texas, Bush worked in secret with representatives from the oil and gas industry to develop a ‘voluntary pollution permitting programme’. As a result Texas became the state with the highest greenhouse gas emissions and producer of toxic chemicals. President Bush now wants to abandon the ratification of the Kyoto protocol in favour of a voluntary system, which would be a repeat of his Texan experiment, but on a much more devastating scale.

Bianca Jagger

Stop Esso Campaign

London

Radical cohesion objectives

It is encouraging that Regional Policy Commissioner Michel Barnier takes an open attitude to the future of European structural policy and invites us all to consider how best to promote European cohesion (Letters, 7-13 June). This should facilitate the radical reorientation now badly needed.

Structural and cohesion policies have achieved a great deal that the Commission has reason to be proud of. They have helped pave the way for several accessions and for launching the internal market and the euro. As Barnier reminds us they have also

had significant “process effects” through the diffusion of new methods and policies. The evidence on redistributive effects is less compelling. The Commission often quotes the Hermin econometric analysis, but more comprehensive simulations such as Quest II indicate more modest results. To promote continued convergence, competition appears more efficient than targeted subsidies.

In the recent SPD programme, Gerhard Schröder proposed the renationalisation of structural policy. In reality, however, our pursuit of regional redistribution has always relied mainly on the member states’ own efforts. About half of the gross disparities between European regions are in fact eliminated through national taxes, transfers, and public expenditures.

Classical structural policy has served its purpose but is now exhausting its agenda. Assuming that the best projects have already been selected, sticking to established guidelines will inevitably lead to diminishing returns. This is one reason why satisfaction with past achievements should not tempt us to perpetuate current programmes.

A future cohesion policy should be given specific and finite objectives, with the “European value added” as a decisive criterion. Let us declare the 1988-2006 pioneer period successfully completed and redirect a significant share of the available funds to priorities that are now becoming urgent: the building of a European “public space”, the furthering of contacts and communications across language barriers, and the promotion of a stronger sense of community through a powerful European component in our schools. In short, a policy in favour of political and cultural cohesion.

Daniel Tarschys

Professor, University of Stockholm

Former Secretary-General of the Council of Europe

Hungary for EU coverage

Dull and superficial. These are probably the two most characteristic ‘virtues’ of Hungarian reporting on

EU-matters, including my country’s own efforts at achieving membership. One might say that in this respect, Hungarian journalism may boast of having reached European standards, since the bulk of news material on Hungary appearing in the western European media is also full of outdated stereotypes.

The average Hungarian news consumer is rather uninformed in European matters so far, so the average journalist reporting on these issues usually goes down to a rather low level, trying to ‘popularise the story’. The problem is that this way the essence is lost more often than not and the reader is left with the image of the famous condom or cucumber carefully standardised by the Brussels bureaucrat.

This is a dangerous downward spiral, since this way you will never raise the level of knowledge of the average reader. There are, of course, Hungarian journalists who are doing a great job – notably the relatively few correspondents sitting in Brussels. But if the orders they get from their home-based editors are for more consumable stories, they will also turn over to condoms and cucumbers.

Another problem is financial. European pages and programmes are not the dreams of advertisers, so they usually fall victim to the decisions made by the managers responsible for ads.

One of Hungary’s two commercial TV stations is producing some interesting and high-end EU-coverage, but they do it irregularly. I asked its responsible chief of news for the reasons. His answer: “If there’s money flowing from the Phare-pipeline, we produce; if not, we don’t.”

Content sponsored by Brussels and/or the national administration is also favoured by some quality papers which thus lose at least partly their control over independent reporting. This practice has nevertheless more advantages than keeping a low profile due to lack of money.

We are in the process of relaunching our website and I’m afraid I will also be forced to look for ‘helping hands’ to be able to maintain a section which would deserve the name ‘European’.

Pál Léderer,

Editor, Népszabadság Online

Budapest, Hungary

Rail vs. road to enlargement

The enlargement survey (7-13 June) read as though we believe the Commission is wrong to promote rail over road. This misrepresents why we think the Instrument for Structural Policies for Pre-Accession (ISPA) funding is being misdirected.

We are concerned not just over the Transport Infrastructure Needs Assessment (TINA) ‘wish list’, but also over the narrow focus for decisions taken on ISPA funding, even where rail projects are promoted.

Firstly large scale prestige schemes are favoured over urban public transport or local rail projects more necessary to maintain network coverage. Secondly no assessment is made to ensure that community funding for rail doesn’t result in accession states shifting their own investments from rail to bad road schemes which wouldn’t gain direct Community support.

We recognise the problems in ensuring harmony between accession states’ own expenditures and Community policies. However, completely ignoring the problem does no good whatsoever. Moreover the Commission and member states urgently need to rein in the European Investment Bank so that its expenditure becomes compatible with all the objectives of the Community, including the environmental objectives.

Frazer Goodwin

Policy Officer

European Federation for Transport and Environment

Brussels

Cyprus gains more ground

I have read with great interest your survey on enlargement (7-13 June) and I would like to congratulate your research team for the excellent analysis and pictorial presentation of the facts and figures relating to the candidate countries.

Regarding the article on competition and the progress achieved by the Luxembourg group, I have noted the comments on Cyprus’ performance as reported in the last Commission’s assessment and I would like to inform you that since then, significant progress has been achieved which gives a totally different picture than the one described in the article. More specifically, the state aid legislation is now in place, the Commissioner on State Aid has been appointed by the Council of Ministers and the Unit on State Aid has been properly staffed and is now fully operational.

I am confident that the Republic of Cyprus will meet all its commitments and will be fully harmonised on this chapter well before accession.

George Vassiliou

Chief Negotiator

Republic of Cyprus

Diplomatic time bomb

According to Dick Leonard (Analysis, 23-30 May), “there is no doubt that Cyprus will be included in the first wave of admissions”.

Indeed, if it is not, there will be no such wave as Greece has announced it will veto the other applicant countries to solve their problems with their neighbours. Alas, we will be admitting a country that has not been able to solve even its own internal institutional problems between two different constituent peoples. As a result there will be extremely serious public order problems.

Last week, Reuters described the situation as a “diplomatic time bomb ticking in Cyprus”. And a high-ranking German official wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemiene that “EU leaders and foreign ministers are treating, in an astonishingly relaxed or even irresponsible way, an issue that could plunge Europe into a crisis, at the latest, by the end of 2002. If the EU reaches the point of agreeing to admit a divided Cyprus without a peace deal on the island, the potential for a crisis with Turkey is enormous.”

Many devoted EU officials and idealist Europeans shiver at the idea of a Cyprus accession as it is clear that the country does not qualify under the Copenhagen political criteria – governed by a regime which lacks constitutional legitimacy in a divided country representing only one of its peoples.

As described by Leonard, because of a unique blackmailing tactic of Athens, this “diplomatic time bomb” will be a member of the EU.

Reading your editorial comment ‘Time for Turkey to act’, I wondered whether your advice was really sound as you described that EU leaders have made no changes in their proposals concerning the use of NATO assets but produced only some cosmetic “amplification”. With your excellent search system for subscribers, I found European Voice in the 22-28 April 1999 issue in which you reported that Turkey, which has been a member of NATO since the 1950s, declared that it would not agree to a new defence body if it could not be a full member of the organisation.

European Voice quoted a senior official saying that “you cannot expect Turkey to sign a ‘blank cheque’ to allow a new European defence organisation to use NATO assets”.

Your editorial in the same issue back in 1999 also noted that NATO members who are not in the EU have “genuine concerns about allowing Union forces to use NATO assets for military campaigns”.

As we observe how at ease Greece is using blackmail tactics in the EU (as demonstrated in the accession of Cyprus and putting Turkey’s relations with the Union at risk), Turkey will indeed be well advised to block any EU-NATO deal until she is given full and equal rights.